Blake Gopnik @ SFAI August 3rd

Washington Post Chief Art Critic

Blake Gopnik

Lecture – Those who don’t know art history are doomed to repeat itAugust 3, 2009 @ 6pm
Tipton Hall
$5 General Public | $2.50 students/seniors/SFAI members

The Santa Fe Art Institute is pleased to bring you chief art critic of the Washington Post, Blake Gopnik as part of our 2009 Visiting Artist & Lecture season, Memory: Shadow and Light | Art as individual/collective memory. Join us for his lecture, “Those who do not know art history are doomed to repeat it,” on Monday, August 3rd, and again on Tuesday, August 4th for a workshop addressing the same topic in a practical, hands-on way.

Blake Gopnik is the chief art critic of the Washington Post, where he publishes regular reviews and features on all aspects of fine art and visual culture. He has also published scholarly articles on Renaissance notions of pictorial mimesis, and is currently doing research on Dutch painting and the psychology of perspective. He holds a doctorate in art history from Oxford University.

Of his August 3rd lecture, Gopnik says, “One of the stranger things about art criticism, especially in the popular press, is its resistance to art history. Thousands of trained scholars spend their careers considering the same art that critics write about, and yet the average art critic feels perfectly comfortable ignoring their insights and innovations. Or rather, critics do depend, almost entirely, on innovative art history – but mostly in versions 50, 100, even 150 years old. Romantic, expressionist and formalist approaches – even clichés – are still the scaffold for much of today’s art criticism. Is another model possible, with popular critics acting as intermediaries between the most compelling new art history and a general public that’s never heard of it? Could art criticism become a kind of laboratory for applied art history?”